Do you see me? Staying visible in a hybrid workplace

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Do you see me? Staying visible in a hybrid workplace’

Viv Groskop
You’ve got this generational divide of older people arguing that you can’t really build a career without visibility long-term, and younger people arguing, why do I have to put in all this face time? You know, what’s with your presenteeism, grandma?

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Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick. Do you ever feel invisible at work? You’re putting in long hours. You’re hitting or even exceeding your targets and yet no one is acknowledging all that effort. If that sounds familiar, keep listening. Because I’ve been speaking to two experts who have some tips about how to raise your profile and make yourself more visible in the workplace. And I wanted to find out how you can do this, even if you consider yourself a regular, modest person. Because nobody likes naked self-promoters. Visibility at work, though, is more important than ever because hybrid work is now the norm. Millions of us are partly at home, partly in the office, and we might not actually get to be face to face with our colleagues or our boss very often, if at all. Viv Groskop, who you heard from at the start of the show is an FT columnist and author. Her forthcoming book, Happy High Status, is about how to become a more confident version of yourself. First, let’s hear from Aliza Licht. She runs a consultancy and is author of a new book, On Brand, about building your career confidence. I started by asking her, why is it so hard to announce our own successes at work?

Aliza Licht
It’s awkward work, right? No one really feels comfortable talking about themselves. I mean, some people do, let’s be honest. Some people have no problem with it. But for the most part, it just feels uncomfortable to talk about what you’ve done. And the problem is waiting around for people to recognise that you’re good at what you do isn’t a strategy that works.

Isabel Berwick
No, it isn’t. So is there ever a time when people are gonna notice what you do? Have you ever had clients who do sort of spring out of the shadows?

Aliza Licht
Overarchingly. Everyone is so busy with their own stuff and the truth is that no one is actually thinking about you, right? So if you want your manager at work to understand what it is that you’re working on or what you’ve been able to do in your role or even, you know, publicly on social media, then you have to shape that narrative. And that is really what On Brand is teaching readers to do because if you don’t shape that narrative, and you know that’s being in media, everyone else will come up with their own version of your story.

Isabel Berwick
That’s a really good point, and I think that’s a mistake a lot of us make, thinking that our managers are thinking about us when in fact they’re just thinking about themselves.

Aliza Licht
So first of all, I think frequency is really important. We all know those people who are constantly talking about their wins online, in person and, you know, essentially you kind of just want to mute those people, right? I want people to learn how to shine a light on themselves and become, in a sense, their own hero, but not to the extent that they become the villain. And what that means is I think a good ratio is for every one time that you are talking about an accomplishment or a win, either in person, on email, online, amplify — proactively, go out and amplify five other people so that the ratio between how often you’re talking about yourself versus helping to promote other people is 1 to 5.

Isabel Berwick
That’s quite high.

Aliza Licht
I know. But, you know, I think that it makes your wins easier to swallow for everyone else, in addition to the fact that, of course, if you have a win that has included other people, like you didn’t get there alone or there’s other team members to mention or people who have, you know, helped you along the way, that’s also a way to, I guess, bolster it. So you’re making it bigger than you.

Isabel Berwick
I know you started off in the shadows essentially. You had an anonymous Twitter feed. Can you tell the listeners what happened when you came out of the shadows? How did that impact you?

Aliza Licht
Well, just to frame it, I was the senior vice-president of global communications for Donna Karan, and I was there for 17 years. And later in the career there, I created DKNY PR Girl, which was an anonymous social media personality inspired by Gossip Girl in 2009, and I was anonymous for almost two years. And it was at a time when — you probably remember this — when, you know, fashion brands were not really on social media yet and certainly not Twitter. So when we finally decided to reveal the person behind the Twitter handle, it just sent shockwaves because it was incredibly popular and generated over 230mn media impressions. And then the cat was out of the bag.

Isabel Berwick
That’s probably the best way to launch yourself. We can’t all do that. But that’s a (chuckles) brilliant story. And I wanted to talk a bit about this kind of weird, post-pandemic hybrid moment we’re in. Now how has hybrid working changed how you advise people to make themselves visible at work because they may not always be on the premises.

Aliza Licht
I love this question because it’s actually one of the reasons why I wrote On Brand. I think that we live in a completely different world now where you have to understand how you’re showing up, no matter the medium — how you’re showing up in person, how you’re showing up on Zoom, how you’re showing up on social media, how are you, you know, showing up on email. We don’t have the luxury of being in front of people as much as we once were, either by choice or just because of circumstances. So I think it’s essential to understand that if you are not being proactive in your communication, you can become invisible. And we all know: out of sight is out of mind. So it is actually everyone’s responsibility to think about, god, what do I want to be known for in my circles, and how do I make sure other people see me that way?

Isabel Berwick
So I think an increasing number of people are finding a slight tension between, you know, working for a corporate and their social media presence. And particularly if you want to move jobs, you know, people look. What would you advise?

Aliza Licht
So first and foremost, I think every quarter you should be doing a spring cleaning. Look at your bio, read it, look at your presence on LinkedIn, go through your social media timelines. Make sure everything is still in support of whatever your goal is, right? There can be tensions between our social media presence and where we work, and I always advise people to understand their company’s social media policy and media policy. Sometimes, you know, we might get a phone call from a reporter that they want comment on something, and you’re all excited because you’re like, oh my god, I’m going to be quoted. But that might not be something your company wants you to do. Or you might get asked to speak at a conference. But again, you are representing your company and a lot of people think like, well, no, no, no, I’m not going to mention where I work and it’s totally fine. You’re still representing your company. So as long as you understand the rules of engagement, that’s number one. The second thing is when you do get an opportunity, it’s really collaborative to take it back to your manager and say, hey, I was asked to speak at this conference. You know, how do you feel about this? Maybe we could work on my messaging for this, so that you bring people into the process and you don’t look as if you’re sort of manoeuvring, you know, externally to, like, leverage yourself. I think that that’s really important because you can bend people out of shape.

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Isabel Berwick
That was Aliza Licht. And it all sounds like a lot of hard work. But I wondered if having a personal brand is basically a fancy way of referring to your professional reputation. For that question, I turned to Viv Groskop. You heard her at the start of the show. She’s been working solo for many years. As well as her stand-up comedy, she’s a writer and host of the podcast How to Own the Room. Viv recently wrote an article for the FT, which draws a distinction between your professional reputation and personal brand, meaning visibility in the workplace.

Viv Groskop
I think the two interact in really different ways in different industries. So reputation, I think, is something that cannot be fixed with any amount of visibility. So, I mean, I know I’m saying this because I am Gen X in inverted commas, and everybody over the age of 40 is probably going to identify with this. No, you can’t buy reputation. You can’t buy experience. You can’t buy time. You can’t buy face-to-face interactions with people and the meaningful trust that comes over time. And the thing I’ve learned in my own career and moving from lots of different careers, from journalism to comedy in to broadcasting, you learn that the more trust you can build with people in different spheres over time, the more people trust you as an individual. They trust your reputation because they’ve worked with you, they’ve seen it, they know it. So reputation is something that you build behind closed doors, really, day in, day out, and you build it on an individual level. Visibility is something that is linked to that and in some ways completely separate. So you could say that visibility is about making your reputation visible.

Isabel Berwick
That’s really interesting. And I wanted to make the more general point about getting back in the office. Does it help your visibility to be present in a workplace, or can you do the same thing online?

Viv Groskop
Yeah, I mean, this is the million-dollar question at the moment, isn’t it? Because you’ve also got this generational divide of older people arguing, and when I say older, I probably mean over 30 now, right? Older people arguing that you can’t really build a career without visibility long-term, and younger people arguing, you know, why do I have to put in all this face time? You know, what’s with your presenteeism, grandma? And I kinda see it from both sides, really, especially because I’ve been an independent myself. I haven’t worked in an office properly for almost 25 years now. So I have some sympathy with people who don’t want to do that. But I also have sympathy with people who have been in that office every single day, year in, year out, to build their reputation, make themselves visible, make their contribution visible. And I think the key here is to figure out the balance, both in terms of where you physically spend your time and how that makes you feel. And in terms of the more abstract question of how you are regarded amongst your peers, amongst people who might hire you, amongst people who might be interested in your work. So if you really are somebody who doesn’t want to be physically visible, then you are gonna have to step up and make yourself perhaps more digitally visible or more visible in the sense of this is way more abstract now, like telephoning people, like using the telephone to connect with people, or really making sure that your contribution is somehow showcased to people. Whether you do that in the form of a newsletter or the form of your social media. But the thing is, these connections are not gonna happen by themself. They are not gonna happen unless you do something.

Isabel Berwick
I’m gonna read a couple of reader comments, and I think when you wrote the branding piece, which I’ll put in the show notes, it really went wild in the comments. People really care about this, and some people really didn’t like the idea. They were calling it self-promotion, I think. There’s a sort of, you know, a kind of quite traditional dismissal of it. And there’s a couple there that I would just wanted to read out and perhaps you could comment on. A personal brand is important as part of career development. We all have one whether or not we want one or have set out to build it. Half of a personal brand is knowing how you want to be perceived and the other half is focusing on achieving it. But you also need to test your brand through feedback and discussions with colleagues and customers, internal and external, and it should feed into the wider development plans to help focus it on what you want in your career. I mean, that’s quite a commodification of brand there, isn’t it, that reader?

Viv Groskop
Yeah. That sounds quite exhausting, doesn’t it? It sounds like you have to build your brand and then you have to bring everyone around to your house through a focus group about your brand. I do think that is an efficacy there. I wouldn’t deny for a second that that approach might work, especially in certain sectors. But I would urge people to listen to that language, listen to that message and say, does that appeal to you personally? If it does and you want to have something that’s quite highly strategised and you want to have a whole kind of flowchart of how you’re going to run your life, great! This is the answer for you (laughs). But some of us are a lot messier than that, and we want to be more ourselves, which is like quite messed up human beings. I’m always conscious that those things cannot quite marry together in a normal, ordinary, everyday human being. They may be can in a product, but ultimately you’re not a product.

Isabel Berwick
No, ultimately we are quite messy. So now you’ve got a new book coming out called Happy High Status, which sort of asks us to look inside ourselves for our strengths. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that? Because it’s quite a different way about thinking about visibility.

Viv Groskop
Happy High Status is an idea that comes from comedy and theatre. Anybody who is trained in improv will be familiar with this concept. There’s a brilliant guru of improv called Keith Johnstone. He wrote a book about status that acquired a huge fandom in the world of stage and comedy. I came across the idea of Happy High Status when I was first training in stand-up comedy, when I was moving from journalism to stand-up, and it was the one concept that completely unlocked everything for me in terms of being more relaxed on stage, being more relaxed when being scrutinised and judged by people and being more open to criticism or more able to let things bounce off me. It’s a really relaxed and magnanimous way of thinking about yourself, where you can lead if called upon, but equally you can follow if called upon. And how it ties into branding is that I think it allows you to take a step back and ask, who am I when I’m feeling at my most comfortable? Who am I when I’m not trying too hard? I think a lot of this branding stuff, especially if it doesn’t feel natural to you, it can feel like trying too hard. And I don’t think that that’s right for everybody. I think for some people it’s absolutely almost like a silver bullet to suddenly finding a way to showcase their reputation and say, this is who I am, this is what I’ve got to offer. But that way of thinking in that kind of status is not for everybody. That’s what worries me slightly about branding, is that in the marketing world, in consumerism, you can’t avoid branding because you’re always branding stuff. But we are not stuff. We are human beings, and we’re all weird and different and individual, and that’s what we need to embrace.

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Isabel Berwick
I wanted to do this episode because visibility in the workplace is vital. And too many people dismiss it because it can be really, really hard to put yourself forward. It seems wrong to so many of us, and I’m generalising here, but often it’s women. You know, making ourselves the centre of attention is the opposite of what we were brought up to do. And in the past, too many of us sat around working incredibly hard, waiting to be noticed by our managers and leaders. Newsflash: they never noticed us. So the modern version of making yourself visible that Viv and Aliza have talked about today is about getting recognition. It’s not boasting, and it’s not pretending to be something you’re not. It might also be that you have to be in the office sometimes because people notice people who are right in front of them, and we can’t change human nature. And it’s also important to note the difference between visibility and reputation. All that hard work you do does not go to waste because you can’t buy or influence yourself to a great professional reputation. And I find that really reassuring.

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My thanks to Aliza Licht and Viv Groskop for this episode. If you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And do get in touch with me. I’m isabelle.berwick@ft.com, or I’m always on LinkedIn. If you’re an FT subscriber, please sign up for our Working It newsletter. We’ve got the best workplace and management stories from across the FT and my new office therapy advice column. Sign up at FT.com/newsletters. This episode of Working It was produced by Audrey Tinline. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa, with mix from Jake Fielding. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.